UK man arrested for running proxy server

The 20 year old was arrested for running the Immunicity proxy server, allowing access to 36 websites that had already been blocked off for being bad men, the U.K. Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) said Thursday.

The arrest is part of the City of London Police unit’s ongoing drive to clamp down on websites providing access to illegal or infringing content.

The man, whose name is as yet unknown, was arrested in Nottingham and released on bail after helping detectives with their enquiries and handed over the names of the domain sites.

Those sites now have a police warning banner, like a virtual 'POLICE DO NOT CROSS' thing.

“We will come down hard on people believed to be committing or deliberately facilitating such offences,” detective chief inspector and head of PIPCU, Andy Fyfe, said in a statement.

Sites that were unblocked by the service included the Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, h33t and several other torrent sites, according to a YouTube video foolishly promoting the service.

However, Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group (ORG), reckons that the arrested man is young and appears not to have been running the proxy service for profit. “One could wonder whether the police had to be involved at this point,” he said.

“I suspect he has done this because he feels annoyed at the Internet being censored, and this is kind of a personal protest rather than an attempt to simply encourage infringements,” Killock said.